Susan Orlean on the Fascinating History and Surprisingly Bright Future of Libraries

When Susan Orlean fishes for a story, she reels in a hidden world. And so the latest delightful trawl from the author of Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief starts with the tale of the 1986 fire that damaged or destroyed 700,000 books in the Los Angeles Central Library. But The Library Book pans out quickly to the fractious, eccentric history of the insitution and then, almost inevitably, a reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America. Orlean follows the narrative in all directions, juxtaposing the hunt for the library arsonist — possibly a frustrated actor — with a philosophical treatise on why and how libraries became the closest thing many of us experience to a town hall. She spoke to Intelligencer this week about her remarkable discoveries (not all as gruesome as the three dead bodies found in recent years among the stacks), her newfound hope for libraries as humanitarian hubs, and why Trump’s erasures of information aren’t far off from lighting a book on fire. (Spoiler: She did that, too.)

You write in The Library Book that, just before embarking on it, you had given up on writing books. What happened?My biography of Rin Tin Tin took me a long time and it really felt grueling. Part of it is that I had a toddler. The subjects that attract me don’t lend themselves easily to being made into books. When I finished Rin Tin Tin I thought, All right, I’m done. I can’t throw myself into another five-year project again and have it looming over me. It’s a little like how the minute you give birth you just say, Oh my God, I don’t know what I was thinking. But when I began thinking about libraries, it immediately came to me: Someone should write a book about a year in the life of a library. And I resisted a little, thinking it was just formless, and that is where I get myself into trouble. And just when I felt that I had resisted successfully, I heard about the fire. That did it for me. It’s like in classic crime movies where somebody says, “This is my last score! One last score and then I’m really out.”

As part of your broader research, you burned a book, a copy of Fahrenheit 451. As a bibliophile and as a writer, to put the flame to the paper — how did that feel?It wasn’t easy, believe me. It was weirdly emotional, even though I could go buy another copy of Fahrenheit 451 in one minute. It wasn’t about the rarity or the preciousness of the book. But that was what I was exploring: Why does it feel so wrong? It was shocking — it happened so fast when I finally put the match to the book. I’m glad I did it. It confirmed to me the sensation that we have about books being more than just blocks of paper. They have a quality that is very human.

You write, “In the saga of humankind, most things are done for money. Library books are burned because they contain an idea that someone finds problematic.” You detail the terrifying history of groups destroying books to amplify their ideology. When Trump took office, someone in the government removed a lot of the public information on climate change. Was that in the back of your mind? Absolutely. The point of book burning is to not have discourse, to say, “This idea doesn’t even exist. These people don’t exist. Culture doesn’t exist. This version of history doesn’t exist.” The idea that a free society suffers from having information available is really, to me, anathema, and tells you a lot about an inability to tolerate divergent opinion. That’s scary. The erasure of information, whether by fire or by deleting a website, never bodes well.

Your family is Jewish, and you write that a third of all the books in Germany were burned during World War II. I’m curious if you felt that this was an erasure of your own past?Oh yeah. Jews have a very deep connection to books. For me it was really horrifying. “Where they burn books, they next burn men”; we saw that to be true. I’m not a historian but I’d be very curious to know of a culture in which books were burned where there wasn’t also mass extermination of people. There probably hasn’t been. That’s so much of what interested me — that the continuum is really uninterrupted from books to people.

The history of L.A.’s Central Library, at least, is very well preserved; the archives survived the big fire. There’s even a section of recordings a librarian made in the 1960s about how hot it was every day in the library without air conditioning. They documented their own existence so well. And I had no idea, until a librarian who I was chatting with asked if I had seen the archives and I said, “Which archives?” And he said, “Well the library’s own archives,” and my mouth started watering. They had 64 boxes of material from the beginnings of the library to the present time — odds and ends and ephemera and newspaper clippings and just amazing stuff — the library’s story of itself.

I was fascinated that the InfoNow department — essentially a Call a Librarian service — survives to the present day. It’s funny because now there’s … Google. Even the librarians occasionally were struck by how odd it seemed that someone would call the library to ask something that was quite easy to look up. But sometimes people just like to ask other people questions — or don’t know exactly how to ask the questions for Google. They have a question that’s more nuanced than what they think they can ask online. They do get more for their money by calling the library. There are some people who literally make up a question so they can call. Their intent is not really to get an answer; it’s just to have human contact. It’s an analog experience in a digital world — a nice antidote to the rest of your daily experience.

I want to talk about some of the Central Library’s librarians, like Wyman Jones, who was the head librarian leading up to the fire. There’s a picture of him in the book on the cover of a magazine called California Librarian, and he looks like a sexy Jack Kerouac. I know! He was a fascinating, cantankerous, arrogant, brilliant man who was sure that he knew the entire story of the library in a way that no one else could ever know it. He basically said, “I’m not going to talk to you because I’m writing my own book,” and yet he couldn’t not talk to me. He would lecture me about what I didn’t know. I had a fascinating relationship with him. It was all on the phone, unfortunately, and he passed away not that long ago. Maybe to run an institution like that you have to be a little bit crazy and arrogant and a little bit sure that everything you know and think is the final word. And he was absolutely in the same mold as Charles Lummis [a notoriously eccentric early head of the library] and some others— just these tremendous, crazy, influential figures who were probably in many instances impossible to work with, but geniuses in their own way.

A long line of women ran the Central Library at the turn of the century, a time when women were not even allowed in a lot of libraries. This book has a lot to say about gender roles in the library.Librarianship was really dominated by men, the same way the teaching profession was — and then there was a big switch. It’s this whipsawing of logic that one can barely make sense of. These women were tremendously important in the running of the library. Mary Jones, who was replaced by Charles Lummis, was a really significant, very progressive figure who had a lot of influence. And she was just dismissed for no logical reason.

Were you indignant on behalf of these women? Jones was fired because the board no longer wanted a woman in charge. Oh God, it was crazy! Some of the women, like Tessa Kelso, were controversial figures — she was a troublemaker, and that’s what got her into trouble. But Mary Jones was a shocking episode. Women came roaring into the profession once the library system expanded so dramatically in the middle of the 20th century. They needed a lot more staff, and women were willing to take those jobs for a very small amount of pay. They were pressed into service in great numbers, and by the time men blinked their eyes women were dominating it.

I expect anybody who writes or thinks about books to be a little pessimistic, but this book is brimming with hope. You say libraries could become a saving grace in our society — a real human unifier. How did you come to this conclusion? If you spend some time in libraries you can’t not notice the commitment and the real dedication that librarians have. It’s truly inspiring. I’m not naïve about the troubles they face. They’re always fighting for money in the budget, and they have to deal with issues that are incredibly difficult in terms of being inclusive of all patrons. But nobody becomes a librarian to be rich or famous, and so there’s this incredible feeling of grace that you sense when you meet them. I also think that in the dark moment when people were scratching their heads and saying, I don’t know why you need a library when everything’s online, smart librarians were in place who could say that’s not what it’s all about. It’s about having a center of information, of knowledge. And libraries have done a fantastic job in reimagining themselves: No no no this is great, this is part of who we are, and now we have more room to do literacy class, to do story time, to do tax preparation.

I loved the librarian who realized he was helping drug dealers with their taxes. Then there was the security guard who told you he’s found three dead bodies in the last six years. Did anything else blow your mind? This doesn’t sound sexy, but just the number of books that are in and out all the time and the number of people flowing through — it was like opening up the back of a grandfather clock and seeing the gears spinning.

Having seen The Orchid Thief turned into such a markedly distorted but fascinating film version, are you thinking that somebody could turn The Library Book into a movie? Not to let the cat out of the bag but you can expect an announcement about that soon. I have a history of these unlikely projects coming together and so I’m really happy about that.

Will you write another book, or are you really done this time? Knowing me, I probably will. No matter how much I assure you and swear up and down that I’ll never write a book, I have a feeling I’ll get snared by a subject that I’ll find too interesting to resist.

Promoted links by Taboola

THE FEED

5:23 p.m.

Mexico had a really bad year

Mexico suffered a record 33,341 homicides in 2018, according to official statistics released Monday, breaking the record set in 2017, as violence fueled by a war on the country’s powerful drug cartels plagues the country.

More than 200,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug trafficking in 2006. The previous record was 28,866 homicides in 2017.

Team Trump reached out to the Special Counsel’s office after BuzzFeed News’ bombshell article last week

A source familiar with the matter tells @HallieJackson that on Friday morning, after the disputed BuzzFeed article dropped, the president’s legal team “raised concerns” in a letter to Mueller’s office. This was prior to the special counsel issuing its rare rebuke Friday evening.

During the summer of 2017, when temperatures reached triple digits in Arizona, four women drove to a vast desert wilderness along the southwestern border with Mexico. They brought water jugs and canned food — items they later said they were leaving for dehydrated migrants crossing the unfriendly terrain to get to the United States.

The women were later charged with misdemeanor crimes. Prosecutors said they violated federal law by entering Cabeza Prieta, a protected 860,000-acre refuge, without a permit and leaving water and food there. A judge convicted them on Friday in the latest example of growing tension between aid workers and the U.S. Border Patrol.

The Russian pop star at the middle of the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting has cancelled his U.S. tour

Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star who is said to have helped arrange Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, said Monday he has been forced to cancel his tour of the United States and Canada “due to circumstances beyond [his] control.”

In a video on Facebook, Agalarov claimed he had nixed the upcoming tour “against his will.” His lawyer said in a telephone interview with NBC News that he doesn’t want his client coming to America under fear of being held under a material witness warrant. Agalarov had been scheduled to perform in New York on Saturday night.

If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my news from legitimate journalists instead of from an online mob for whom Saturday-morning indignation is just another form of entertainment. And above all, I’ll try to take the advice I give my kids daily: Put the phone down and go do something productive.

President Donald Trump’s social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos.

In recent months, Trump’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. If it only happened once you might be able to chalk it up as an accident. But Gizmodo has discovered at least three different retouched photos on President Trump’s social media pages that have been published since October of 2018.

The number of U.S. airport screeners who took unscheduled absences rose to 10 percent on Sunday, more than triple that of a year ago as the stalemate over the government shutdown continued over a holiday weekend, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The number of unscheduled TSA absences hit the highest level seen so far, the TSA said in a statement Monday as the shutdown entered its 31st day. A year ago the absence rate was 3.1 percent.

Chris Christie goes after the “riffraff” in the Trump administration in a new excerpt from his memoir — Let Me Finish

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. …

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) … Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

Bloomberg speech at @NationalAction DC breakfast a concerted effort to prove his life has focused on issues important African-American community, touching on education, environmental justice, lessons from father, and - above all - gun violence

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.

Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.

The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.

More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.

Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.

“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”

Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …

In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history

GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ

Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”

“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …

Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”

An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis

A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.

“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”

Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.

On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.

On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.

“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”

Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.

“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”

1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.

2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).

4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

More comments from the Native American elder who was harassed by MAGA-clad teens on Friday in D.C.

[64-year-old Nathan] Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd. …

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.

“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said. …

Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement. A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.